Landscape 4, Upper East Side (Met Breuer)Oil and acrylic on canvas201848 x 72 inches
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Biography

My paintings capture architecture and/or the built environment in a state of flux. Past series have focused on suburban sprawl, construction sites, and abandoned, decaying homes and factories. More recent canvases depict hotel rooms and parking garages–spaces that are specifically designed to accommodate the temporary, accepting change and transition as a constant state. Along these lines, I am currently developing a new body of work that explores the architecture of exhibition space. This is the series that I have titled White Walls. The work is ongoing, but I have begun with images of art fair tents, minimalist gallery interiors, and video-screening rooms. The spaces in these paintings are at once austere and lavish; makeshift and highly controlled; impersonal and sacred. I am interested in the notion of spectacle and the role that architecture plays in orienting the viewer’s experience of a work of art. These new paintings also bring up issues of access (as in Barrier, 2014 and Gate, 2014) and audience (as in Loop, 2014). As with all my work, human occupants are notably absent from the scenes depicted, forcing the viewer to consider his or her own position relative to the image.

With their emphasis on geometry, pattern, and surface, my paintings hover in a zone between stark realism and abstraction. Playing with the materiality of paint, I apply both oils and acrylics to a single canvas and juxtapose various painting “styles,” deliberately undermining the illusion of depth and the unity of the completed image. My work often appears photo-realistic when seen in reproduction, but–seen in person–the painted surface asserts itself forcefully, and the viewer is able to dissect the process by which the image was made. This is important to me. I care deeply about making paintings–physical objects with which the viewer will have a direct, visceral relationship and response.